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orbital_narwhal t1_it6jhqa wrote

Reply to comment by chunseye in Why does alcohol kill bacteria, but not the cells that our bodies are composed of? by Chairman_Mittens

Depends on what your metric for “more” is.

  • Number of individual cells? Bacteria win.
  • Combined mass? Human body wins.
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regular_modern_girl t1_it744li wrote

The very paper they posted a link to above (as well as the one mentioned in the Nature article I posted, because they both say the same thing) makes it pretty clear that bacteria wins neither. There are about the same number of bacterial cells as human cells in an average human body, and they make up only around 0.2 kg of a human body’s mass.

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chunseye t1_it6op3b wrote

If you say "more cells" you're implying number of cells. If you say "more cell mass", then you're implying mass.

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